The history of psychology, and especially of the psychoanalytic tradition initiated with Sigmund Freud, is closely related to the interpretation of dreams. This makes many people wonder what it means to dream every night about the same person , or at least with a relatively high frequency.

To answer this question we must first understand what people like Freud understood dreams to be and what contemporary psychology linked to the neurosciences understands by them.

Freud and the interpretation of dreams

For the father of psychoanalysis, dreams were a way for the unconscious to manifest itself indirectly in our thoughts. From this point of view, a good part of what we dream is actually a set of symbols about sensations and thoughts that have been confined to the unconscious because they are too stressful or unbearable to be processed by the conscious mind.

According to Freud, a portion of the contents of the unconscious that our mind tries to repress so that its existence is not much noticed are not traumatic memories in themselves but desires and thoughts that must be hidden because of their immoral implications.

This has a lot to do with the theory of ego structures, according to which there is an entity called Ello linked to the most basic and emotional desires and impulses, another called Superyó that represents all the moral norms and impositions linked to the idea of perfection, and another called Yo that arbitrates the relationship between the other two so that we do not enter into a crisis.

Thus, dreams could be expressing repressed desires , and this would be noticeable in the case of dreaming a lot about the same person.

Does this mean there’s a sexual desire?

Although Freudian psychoanalysis is known to put a lot of emphasis on human sexuality understood as psychological energy that motivates us to behave in a certain way and not in another, that does not imply that dreaming every night about the same person means that we want it, from this psychodynamic tradition. For example, it could mean that we would like to take revenge on that person, or that that figure is actually the symbol that serves to represent an abstract idea.

That means that, from psychoanalysis, there is no single, simple and universal answer to the question of what it means to always dream about someone . Historically, finding an answer was one of the main tasks of psychoanalysts, and that could mean that they had to spend several sessions until they reached a conclusion. In other words, it was examined case by case, since one of the characteristics of symbols is that they can be interpreted in an infinite number of possible ways.

Thus, in order to find the correct interpretation, it was necessary to know the whole psychological background of a person until certain tendencies or reasonable explanations were detected from a complete analysis.

All this from the paradigm of psychoanalysis, of course. Now then… what does current psychology say about this?

A science-based interpretation

Contemporary psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, is based on the scientific method, which means that it aspires to create scientific theories based on false hypotheses. This means that all explanations that are so abstract and imprecise that they cannot be refuted by contrast with reality are rejected. And the psychoanalytic explanation of the human mind is highly abstract and based on claims that cannot be proven, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper criticized.

That is why, for the topic at hand, the explanation for the fact that we dream a lot about a person is relatively simple. We dream about that person because we keep his memory alive and think about him often or about the concepts associated with him.

There are neither repressed desires nor memories blocked by something called “consciousness”: there is simply a phase of sleep in which memories of concepts already in our brain are “activated” in a relatively chaotic way, creating strange sequences of ideas. And, the more times groups of neurons are activated that when “turned on” at the same time evoke a concept, the more likely it is that this will happen again in the future.

A matter of attention

What happens in our dreams is not a reflection of our repressed desires, but, in a general sense, of what we give importance to in an abstract sense. That is why, for example, in many of them we dream that our life or that of someone important is in danger, because death is something that worries us and leaves a deep mark in our memory from experiences related to this concept. The same happens with people close to us: we think about them a lot, and this is reflected in their frequency of appearance in dreams.

However, the importance we give to these elements does not tell us anything about what we want to do or about those concrete concerns that populate our minds, because this would require a part of our nervous system to “code” messages in code that only manifest themselves in sleep; something that makes no sense and is of no use.

So you know: if you dream about a person a lot, don’t worry about trying to unravel hidden meanings about possible traumas or desires that aren’t really there. If there’s nothing to indicate that you have a problem, chances are you don’t have one; simple as that .